Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • A Belly Laugh Is Worth a Thousand Likes

    A Belly Laugh Is Worth a Thousand Likes

    Like many of my fellow Boomers, I’ve gone down a commonly trodden and forlorn path in the realm of dwindling friendships. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I took friendship for granted. It came as naturally as going to the gym, shopping for clothes, going to clubs, and eating lunch at a cafe. These endeavors were often accompanied by friends. In the 80s and 90s, long conversations on landline phones were also part of the fabric of my social life. That I merited a two-hour phone conversation was no big deal. People found me engaging. My self-worth wasn’t something I questioned. It was simply a matter of fact that I was worthy of a two-hour conversation on random topics.

    Spending time with friends diminished in my late thirties and forties. I would go to a restaurant once every other month or so with colleagues. As I grew apart from some of them and others retired, I did not notice that their disappearance was not accompanied by replacements. My friendship count went down. Meanwhile, I acclimated to life in the cave, my expression for retreating into a suburban enclave and learning to entertain and distract yourself as you disconnect from the beehive of life.

    As engagement farms sprouted up around 2010 and offered frictionless, half-baked social interaction, my habits of isolation worsened because superficial parasocial interactions substituted for in-depth, messy, real ones. These digital engagements proved unsatisfactory. Engagement on these platforms was not authentic friendship. It was a brief burst of dopamine. When the dopamine died, you were left hungry for real social interaction. These engagement farms, in other words, were the equivalent of junk food. You could overconsume the processed stuff while remaining emotionally malnourished.

    Fifteen years of this social deprivation, combined with the chaos and false euphoria of attention-capture platforms, lulled Boomers like me into a state of social isolation that became our new normal.

    There could be a gender factor here. My wife maintains real friendships, and she notices my deprivation in that department. She wants me to put time and energy into my “social health,” as she calls it. I agree that engaging in real friendships would be good for my social health and, in turn, put less pressure on her. The problem is that I don’t have a magic wand. I can’t say abracadabra and have a friend materialize like a genie from a bottle.

    Social entropy is a real and insidious thing that can’t be reversed overnight. I worry that you reach an age and become so entrenched in routines and habits that you cross the Isolation Rubicon, making a return to a normal and healthy social world extremely difficult.

    In this new landscape, where landline phones and two-hour conversations have become extinct and we spend much of our time in parasocial engagements, I can appreciate some of these mediated communications. By and large, people are friendly on my YouTube channel and Instagram page. I don’t diminish these interactions. I simply see them for what they are. They are limited because they exist in the digital sphere. They cannot substitute for real interaction.

    I’m reminded of a recent conversation I had with two Trader Joe’s clerks, both in their late twenties. One was scanning my food items. The other was bagging them. I told them that 99% of the time I shop at Trader Joe’s at eight a.m., and I want to be out of the store by 8:45 because I notice that each passing hour brings more people, stress, and anxiety. I told them that one time I had to come in at three p.m. for emergency provisions when my wife’s friends from out of town showed up. I walked into a crowded Trader Joe’s and didn’t even recognize the place. Nor did I recognize the customers.

    “These aren’t my people,” I said.

    My dismay at feeling like an alien during my afternoon shopping spree made the clerk, a short woman whose arms were generously covered with tattoos, stop scanning my groceries. She let out a loud belly laugh. I could see the self-abandoned joy in her face. Making her laugh in that moment was more gratifying than a decade of social-media engagements. You cannot substitute real engagement with parasocial interplay.

    But real engagement is increasingly rare. If I shop at Target, there is no clerk. I scan the items myself while a robot admonishes me if I don’t place them in the designated bagging area.

    A lot of my social deprivation is of my own making. I am lazy, sullen, egotistical, and introverted. While I can be entertaining, I am usually tolerated in low doses. Regardless of what I think about myself, the world does not owe me a bevy of friends waiting on my doorstep to join them in some madcap adventure or other.

    I feel dumb that back in 2010 I was enticed by the so-called social-media corporations. Relying on engagement farms for a morsel of social interaction while curating some energetic persona full of moxie and frisson was pure chicanery. The fact that I substituted this curated nonsense for real life was my fault. I played myself. I let the engagement-farm companies play me as well.

    I don’t have an easy solution to my social health, but I can see the landscape clearly. I am sobered enough after decades of curating a dazzling persona to end that folly. Wherever life takes me from this point on, I’m going there without the fakery.

  • Dude, You’d Make a Great Eighty-Five-Year-Old

    Dude, You’d Make a Great Eighty-Five-Year-Old

    When I was in my late thirties, I was visiting my wife’s family for a summer barbecue in Long Beach. Her brother and some of his friends were there. We were standing on the front lawn talking about some of my habits and routines: eating dinner no later than five; going to bed no later than ten; eating sufficient fiber; abstaining from alcohol but deriving great pleasure from sipping chilled prune juice, analyzing its complex flavors with the panache of a sommelier; driving to movie theaters an hour early to make sure I get a parking space and a good seat; avoiding long drives because I find them mentally taxing; and buying a car only after scouring the reliability data in Consumer Reports.

    At one point, one of my brother-in-law’s friends, Shane, a tall, Viking-like figure with light blue eyes and shaggy blond hair, casually looked at me and said, “Dude, you’d make a great eighty-five-year-old.”

    I can understand Shane’s comment. I am not a risk-taker. I like predictability and routine. I like reliable outcomes. I am drawn to things that give me assurance and safety.

    Take cars, for example. I am drawn to Honda. I have been buying Hondas for the last four decades. I like the interiors. They are familiar. I know how to use the controls. The ride is smooth. There is no drama. The styling is not too busy. It tends toward vanilla. I even like the word Honda. It sounds angelic, whispery, and soothing. Repeating the word over and over is a form of ASMR.

    My connection to Honda runs so deep that my wife and I both own Honda Accords. Hers is a 2014 with a 2.4-liter naturally aspirated engine, and mine is a 2018 with a 2.0 turbo. When our twins get their driver’s licenses, we plan on buying another Accord, a hybrid that gets around 50 mpg. Or perhaps a Camry Hybrid. Whichever brand is the most reliable when I’m ready to buy. Because I am willing to share my Accord with my daughters, I can hold off on buying my next car. I think I might wait until the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. By then, Accords and Camrys will probably get over 60 miles per gallon.

    Regardless of what I do, I will be anxious because a big purchase entails risk. I am risk-averse. To minimize risk, I seek monotony, routine, and familiarity. I subscribe to the adage that it’s better to be with the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

    This does not mean I’m provincial. I’d be just as happy having a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast as I would a bowl of Korean bibimbap. I find both dishes comforting. Both are familiar to me. Both are reliably delicious.

    So I’m a bit riled that in the summer of 2000 Shane said I’d make a great eighty-five-year-old. Actually, I would not. I can lift more weight than most men half my age. I love international food, the spicier the better. I watch daring, often subversive television, movies, and documentaries. I am, in other words, youthful and adventurous when it comes to exercise, eating, and entertainment.

    On the other hand, I am admittedly overly cautious and ridiculously obsessive when it comes to maintaining my routine and making big consumer purchases. But I think my contradictions should be appreciated. Labeling me prematurely old is inaccurate and demonstrates weak analytical skills.

    I love Shane. I wish him the best, and I am eager to locate him, if for no other reason than to discuss his appraisal of me as an exemplar of an eighty-five-year-old on my wife’s family’s lawn that summer day in 2000.

    I might even politely challenge him to an arm wrestle.

  • The Great Honda Uncoupling

    The Great Honda Uncoupling

    A car crisis has entered my life and sent me down a rabbit hole of angst and distress. Honda has a major engine problem affecting many of its models. The problem involves the cylinder-head gasket losing its seal. This can result in coolant loss, overheating, engine misfires, and coolant entering the combustion chambers. The affected engines include Honda’s 1.5-liter turbos, 2.0-liter turbos, naturally aspirated 2.0-liters, and naturally aspirated hybrid models. Eight models are affected from 2017 through 2026. Honda has extended the warranty on these models to ten years or 150,000 miles.

    My 2018 Accord with the 2.0 turbo is not on the list. While I’m relieved, I’m not exactly brimming with confidence either. It is more than eight years old with only 29,200 miles on the odometer as I write this twenty days before my sixty-fifth birthday, October 28. I no longer look at my Accord with confidence. I look at it with mistrust.

    And this leads to a painful fact: I am afraid that Honda and I may be uncoupling.

    I take this breach of trust personally. Having a car divorce after forty years is heartbreaking. Honda was always my cozy companion. Honda was my trusty sherpa, taking me to work, medical appointments, Trader Joe’s, and Target. The Honda service center is within walking distance of my home. I know the staff. I joke with them. I tell them how much I love Honda. They smile back at me tenderly. Like me, they own Hondas. They are part of my extended family.

    But the breach of trust resulting from faulty engines has forced me to look elsewhere. Honda’s only competition for me is Toyota because, like Honda, it has a reputation for reliability. However, while the Honda service center is only one and a half miles away, the Toyota service center is an intimidating four miles away. Yet a little research offers some consolation: Toyota offers a pickup and drop-off service, which Honda does not. More importantly, Toyota has a clean bill of health on its engines, which Honda does not.

    In my risk-averse mind, I’m uncoupling from Honda and moving toward Toyota. For me, this is far more than a rational consumer decision. The change has emotional weight. It’s like getting divorced and remarried. It’s like selling your house and moving across the country. It’s like making a career change. Imagine working as an engineer for twenty years and then opening a yoga studio. I am entering foreign territory.

    But Honda has left me little choice. For years, its engineers had a massive engine problem growing right under their noses. This degree of negligence and incompetence feels like the automotive equivalent of marital infidelity. A massive breach of trust has occurred.

    And this points to yet another problem: If and when Honda fixes its defective engines, regaining my trust could take at least a decade. I would need long-term data to be convinced that Honda reliability is up to spec again. I don’t want to be the car buyer who provides the data. I want to be the car buyer who studies the data after the fact and then makes his decision.

    Buying a car is like choosing a bride. I don’t want some thirty-six-month dalliance with a car lease. I want to commit for the long term. Till death do us part.

    The holy sacrament between Honda and me has dissolved. Unless Honda does something as dramatic as moving a few mountains and parting the Pacific Ocean to win back my trust, I am afraid the uncoupling is upon us.

    I am looking over the horizon.

    I see a beaming light.

    It reads Toyota Camry.

    Preferably in Dark Cosmos.

  • Writing After the Death of Reading

    Writing After the Death of Reading

    When the deep reading of long and complex writing is no longer the fabric of our culture, there will be a vacuum. It will be filled, of course. What fills the vacuum is not pretty. It is chaos, unbridled passions, dopamine, outrage, and a nightmarish phantasmagoria from which there may be no return.

    I keep coming back to Childish Gambino and his music video “This Is America,” in which cars are aflame, people are dancing amid the violence, chaos, and rubble, and the young generation is perched above the hellscape, distracted by their smartphones. The singer refers to the phones as “tools.” These tools can capture the chaos but cannot make sense of it. They can also serve another function: hijacking the brain. As the fires rage and the chaos intensifies, the mind is soothed by a new dance or cat video. Or one becomes engaged with a conspiracy and feels special for having the mindfulness to give credence to something the dumb masses have dismissed. Meanwhile, the hellscape gets worse as ordered reality recedes into the distance.

    Becoming untethered from reality, losing civic order, becoming addicted to screen-fueled dopamine, and living in ever-growing chaos is not the hellscape of the future. It is now. James Marriott sees this hellscape as the direct result of our loss of reading. In his book The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, his central argument is that literacy is essential to maintaining civilization. As he writes in his introduction: “I believe much of the disorder and unreason of the twenty-first century is a direct consequence of the fading of the written word and colonisation of our culture by addictive screens. As reading declines, the result, evident all around us, is the intellectual hollowing out of our society. Without reading, the world is going to become less rational and more disordered.” His book argues that we have not yet “fully grasped the consequences of this transformation” from reading books to gazing at content on screens.

    The way we absorb information as a result of technology presents a moral dilemma in the way I communicate with others. Do I stop writing and make “content” that is accessible to people acclimated to a world in which reading has been replaced by digital content? To be more specific, do I abandon the project of my blog and replace it with video essays meant for publication on YouTube? If I do so, am I part of the problem, kowtowing to a digital world of frictionless rewards, or am I simply being reasonable by communicating with people in the way they are most likely to receive ideas?

    I do have a blog. I enjoy keeping it active and posting almost every day, but if I write an essay on the blog and don’t post the link to my YouTube channel, only about five people will read it. If I post the link, I might get thirty visitors. On the other hand, if I take the same content, sit in front of a video camera for twelve minutes, and post the video essay on YouTube, I can get a few thousand views over the course of a few days. There is no contest. The evidence has made it clear. People don’t want to read my content. They would rather watch me sit with my ebony Yamaha piano behind me and talk about a subject for ten to fifteen minutes.

    So I have to make a choice. I can post something on my blog and be the tree that falls in the forest and makes no noise, or I can deliver a video presentation in which I try to make my personal challenges relevant to others and have a voice that actually gets heard.

    To clarify the situation even further, I have a hundred subscribers to my blog. I have over eleven thousand subscribers to my YouTube channel. I can see the communication landscape clearly. You go to work where the job is. There isn’t much opportunity to spread my ideas in the blog market. There are more opportunities on YouTube.

    I don’t take YouTube for granted either. I tell my viewers that, as a middling presence on YouTube, I view my channel like a restaurant. It stays open as long as the customers show up. It took a long time to get a substantial audience. For a decade, I talked about my watch obsession, did “State of the Watch Collection” videos, and interrogated my watch-related madness. Fellow watch enthusiasts could relate. We took solace in knowing we weren’t alone. We understood each other.

    But eventually, this path presented some challenges. I could only talk about my watch addiction for so long before I began repeating myself. As other YouTubers created more and more polished and highly edited watch videos, I found myself feeling redundant and technologically backward in that world. I had to make a lane change.

    My subject matter broadened to include my personal life challenges, such as living in my sixties and preparing financially and emotionally for retirement. Sometimes I’d throw in some watch talk, most noticeably my pivot from expensive mechanical diver watches to more affordable G-Shocks. The older I got, the less I wanted to deal with owning and servicing mechanical watches and the more I was comforted by the atomic accuracy and solar power of my G-Shocks.

    To my surprise, a sit-down video essay can perform better than a video featuring a watch close-up. I think I know why. YouTube viewers have become sophisticated enough to know that I don’t have anything special to offer in delivering watch eye candy. My strength is the video essay. I will lean into it and keep it going. I retire the channel when the customers stop showing up.

    Of course, I lament our post-reading world, the one James Marriott has described with such sharp insight and clarity. Of course, I am disappointed that I am not a published writer with a significant following. But I’m reminded of when I play Yahtzee. My daughter and I use a common expression when we’re aiming for a high score, such as getting a large straight, and end up having to settle for a small straight. Instead of complaining about the lot given to us, we say, “I’ll take what I can get.”

    If there is an audience out there that hungers for authentic ideas in a ten-minute video, then I will use that hunger as a toehold, stick my foot into it, and try to leverage myself up the mountain. I’ll keep ascending that world of ideas until I can no longer find footing and the unforgiving landscape demands that I stop climbing.

  •  I Never Want to See the Caffeinated Squirrel Again

     I Never Want to See the Caffeinated Squirrel Again

    What does an essay about the death of performative AI-enhanced writing have to do with a book about retirement, aging, and death? It has everything to do with it because the death of performative AI-enhanced writing means I get to live. By live, I mean my voice, my authenticity, and my creativity.

    My experiments with AI writing tools over the last four years took me down a dark road in which, for a long stretch, I used AI the way a bodybuilder uses steroids. AI boosted my prose, made it more muscular, and gave it a more dramatic flex. I’d write my original content and give AI this prompt: “Rewrite the following with lucid prose, acid wit, and vivid descriptions.” With this one prompt, my content was no longer 100% mine. It was closer to 80%. The extra 20% belonged to my co-author. And that 20% made my sentences, similes, metaphors, and witticisms exist in a kind of AI-infused alchemy. AI wasn’t just providing spice and accent to my ingredients. It was adding additional ingredients to the recipe.

    My prose was eye-catching at first. It made me feel like the bodybuilder who no longer competed onstage with respectable 18-inch biceps. Now when I strutted across the stage, my biceps had a peak on top of a peak on top of yet another peak and bulged to over 22 inches.

    This kind of writerly muscle-flex became addicting at first, but over time, I had to abandon it. Not only did the additional muscle call my authorial authenticity into question, but it became a form of overwriting, even purple prose. It became mind-numbing. Worse, it became exposed as imitative when I saw the same muscular prose in other people’s online essays, my students’ essays, and even Amazon reviews.

    AI was recycling the same arsenal of stock linguistic tricks for all buyers. Someone wasn’t frenzied anymore. They had the energy of a “caffeinated squirrel.” AI would present the caffeinated-squirrel image over and over without shame. When recalling a long stretch of time that harkened back to the past, AI was fond of writing, “Not since the Nixon Administration had I forgotten my breakfast.” It would use this Nixonian reference even if you were referring to 1981, when the hackneyed reference to the Reagan Administration would at least be accurate.

    Whenever I wanted to write about a misguided quest or the purchase of a disappointing consumer product, AI’s stock joke was that my instant coffee or microwave oatmeal made me regret my life choices. For reasons I don’t understand, AI also gravitated toward certain verbs and nouns. It overused anchor or anchoring, as in fixing something firmly to something else. Everything was getting anchored. AI also overused architecture as a substitute for structure. Everything had an architecture. A philosophical treatise had an underlying architecture. So did Baskin-Robbins.

    Throwing around words you never used before in these new contexts—anchor, architecture—made you feel smarter until it didn’t. It stopped making you feel smarter when you saw your students using the same bag of tricks.

    Another danger of using AI as a co-author is the slippery slope. Infusing your writing with growth hormones can lull you into laziness so that, little by little, you outsource your thought and effort to the machine.

    Eventually, you reach the point where AI has kicked your butt. You look at your AI writing assistant and say, “All right, you won. I’m a ghost of my former self.” You reach the point where you have to reclaim your authorship and your humanity.

    If you’re going to use AI at all, you need to set boundaries. Get rid of the prompt “Rewrite the following with lucid prose, acid wit, and vivid descriptions,” which can add a good 20% of synthetic muscle to your original content. Replace it with this one: “Rewrite the following by preserving its original content while editing to improve clarity, concision, and polish for meaning and sentence structure. The edit should preserve 95% of the original content.”

    This is the Authentic Content Prompt.

    It should be applied as a universal rule in a world of ideas where authenticity and integrity need some kind of imprimatur amid the digital morass of AI slop. Just as the Good Housekeeping Seal became a trusted symbol that a product had been tested and met the Good Housekeeping Institute’s standards, perhaps we need a Good Writing Integrity-Keeping Seal of approval. Readers could go online and see this recognizable seal on a webpage, assuring them that what they are reading contains original content without the synthetic muscle.

    Whether or not such a seal of approval ever materializes, my AI experiments have led me to my own personal Authentic Content Prompt.

    My ACP, as I call it, keeps AI as an editor and prevents it from becoming a co-author. As the latter, it becomes dangerous and should be known as the Toxic Purple Prose Machine. Use it at your own risk. 

  • The Nap of No Return

    The Nap of No Return

    As a lifelong sloth and connoisseur of comfort, routine, and having “everything just so,” I have to be wary of infantilization, the habit of soothing myself by disengaging from the world until I enter long stretches of mindless inertia.

    I am not particularly vulnerable to this dangerous habit in the morning. I write, play the piano, and work out with kettlebells in the garage. But after lunch and my fitful post-workout nap, I am drawn to the couch and my true crime shows. That is where I can become lizard-eyed and begin checking out from life.

    Part of my afternoon retreat is owed to my lifelong inability to sleep well. I haven’t gotten eight straight hours of sleep in more than forty years. I wake from disturbing dreams that are all different and all the same. I’m often traveling in a caravan of people. We are walking or driving along the coast, embarked upon some vague quest. The leader, generally speaking, is not happy with me. I am too grumpy. I am moving too slowly or too quickly. I am going down the wrong path.

    Invariably, I get lost and have to find my way back to the group. I am in a state of great distress. The harder I try to rectify the situation, the worse it becomes. Eventually I wake up and try to process another haunting narrative featuring me as the stray sheep. I go to the bathroom, return to the bed or the couch, where I probably migrated around midnight, put in my earbuds, and hope a podcast will lull me back to sleep.

    My nights of tumultuous, broken, tormented sleep point to the fact that I am a restless, anxious person. Letting go and giving myself over to the moment is difficult, not just when sleeping but in other endeavors.

    Reading can be a challenge, especially when I find myself getting irritated because a book seems padded with fluff. It should have been an essay or a short story, but instead it has been inflated into a 300-page monstrosity of repetition and tedium.

    Sitting through a two-hour movie can prove almost impossible. If the movie features a detective wearing a turtleneck sweater in a balmy climate, I experience vicarious heat exhaustion and have to turn off the television or flee the theater before I suffer a nervous breakdown. When characters eat at a dinner table during a TV show or movie, I lose interest in the plot and start wondering what they’re eating. Soon I am getting an apple from the refrigerator.

    I can relax in certain circumstances. I can sit down at the piano for twenty minutes. Piano is a reliable source of anxiety release, especially when I play for an imaginary audience in which I am the hero. There is something wonderfully relaxing about playing a sonata before imaginary admirers who are being lulled into the same state of relaxation by my piano playing that I am.

    Another reliable source of relaxation is the afternoon consumption of television droning in the background while I descend into a blissful half-sleep condition I call the Womb State.

    An African animal documentary narrated by my trusty guide David Attenborough can put me into the Womb State. A true crime series in which detectives are waiting to learn whether ballistic evidence matches the casings used by their suspect can lull me into the Womb State.

    My deepest, most blissful descent into the Womb State in recent memory occurred when I put on my noise-cancelling headphones, opened Netflix on my phone, and listened to The Big Picture podcast. Listening to the gregarious Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins speculate for two hours about which movies might produce the year’s Best Actor was a euphoric state of relaxation more potent than Xanax or Valium.

    As I am only a few weeks from turning sixty-five and know that my sleep will probably become lighter and lighter, I realize I may depend increasingly on these Womb State pastimes. Opening a streaming app on my phone, putting on my noise-cancelling headphones, and listening to animal documentaries, crime shows, and movie-review podcasts may add fifteen years to my life.

    The problem, of course, is overdoing it.

    When I like something, I tend to overdo it, and the relentless pursuit of the Womb State can result in infantilization.

    As someone whose anxious personality denies him a good night’s sleep, I crave the Womb State as a counterbalance. I crave the soothing sounds of a podcast or documentary while giant cushioned headphone cones surround my ears and I lie on a Beautyrest with diamond-infused memory foam and microcontouring pocketed nano-coils while a Tempur-Pedic pillow cradles my neck. In the proper dose, this afternoon ritual gives me the rest I need.

    Taken to extremes, however, the ritual becomes part of the dark arts.

    The nap with headphones is no longer about rejuvenation. It is about extinction.

    Think of the 1973 movie Soylent Green, a dystopian nightmare in which citizens can choose voluntary euthanasia. They listen to soothing music while immersed in wraparound projections of beautiful landscapes. The government controls these citizens in part through the power of infantilization. There is a fine line between wanting to let go and becoming a helpless, malleable citizen whose self-agency has disappeared forever.

    I therefore need to remain wary of the temptations of infantilization. Napping may provide necessary rest for a man who can’t get a good night’s sleep, or it could be the precursor to the Nap of No Return.

    Just as David Attenborough adds extra gravitas and poignancy to his voice while describing an old alpha lion leaving its pride to die in isolated dignity, I can imagine the fabled naturalist shifting his commentary to me:

    “And here lies a man for whom the nap crept up on him and would not let go. Here in the suburbs, the greatest threat is not a natural predator. It is infantilization.”

  • Life Refuses to Follow the Syllabus

    Life Refuses to Follow the Syllabus

    My fiction professor N.V.M. Gonzalez told our class in the early 1980s that we had to write our short stories over and over until they reached a pristine state in which we no longer had to apologize for anything in them. The stories had to stand on their own, beyond reproach.

    I thought of Gonzalez’s words when I came across a section of The Good Life Method in which the authors present a writing exercise: You have to write an apologia, or apology, for your own life. Apology in this context doesn’t mean saying you’re sorry. It means “speaking in one’s defense.” Your philosophical core, and the actions that grow from it, should be things you can defend on philosophical grounds.

    The authors provide several examples. I’ll mention three. Socrates defended his pursuit of the good life, a quest that embarrassed and antagonized the elite class. Augustine defended his religious conversion. Nietzsche defended his rejection of Christian morality and his vision of the Übermensch, or superman, a figure capable of overcoming inherited values and creating new ones rather than obediently accepting the old moral structure.

    Your personal apologia contains three building blocks. The first is a story that raises the question of what constitutes the good life and suggests a possible answer. The second is an argument for your goal, or higher purpose. The third is the method—the means by which you intend to achieve your goal of living the good life.

    The authors make it clear that having the correct conception of the good life isn’t enough. You have to act in accordance with your ideal. To make their case, they cite Aristotle, who warned about the chasm between belief and action. He compares people who philosophize without changing their lives to patients who listen attentively to their doctors and then ignore every instruction. The patients won’t become healthy, and neither will the philosophers. In religious terms, faith without works is dead.

    As I consider the personal apologia and its three building blocks, it occurs to me that this exercise is essentially a Life Syllabus complete with Enduring Understandings. You identify the good life, establish the philosophical basis for it, and create a plan of action for living it.

    That is your syllabus.

    It seems reasonable to me that a young person should have such a Life Syllabus. Having one is surely more profitable than not having one. Living every day as if you’re making everything up as you go along strikes me as both depressing and futile.

    I’m reminded of a friend who waited tables in Denver in the early 1980s. Eventually the job depressed him because, as he explained it, every day he was starting from scratch. The job gave him nothing to build upon. Every shift he constructed a tower of blocks, and by the next shift the tower had collapsed. He had to start all over again.

    A syllabus, with its building blocks, promises the opposite. It gives you a journey in which one action builds upon the previous one. You are making something of yourself. You are flourishing. You are moving closer to the good life and, presumably, becoming a good person along the way.

    For a young person, such a journey seems profitable. If you are in your mid-sixties, as I am, it isn’t too late. In fact, the matter has become considerably more urgent.

    So with this in mind, I return to the apologia and its first building block: a personal story that gave me some glimpse of an answer to the question of how to live a good life.

    The first story that comes to mind happened in 1981. I was a nineteen-year-old bodybuilder attending college in Northern California. Preparing for the late-summer Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest at Mission High School, I ate a high-protein, low-carb diet and tanned every day. In the weeks leading up to the contest, my clothes began hanging from my 180-pound, perfectly tanned physique like a bad costume. This necessitated an entirely new wardrobe, which brought me to a fitting room in a Pleasanton shopping mall.

    While I tried on pants behind gauzy curtains, two attractive young women standing outside began arguing over which one should ask me out. Their voices grew louder and louder, which I interpreted as compelling evidence that I was a highly valued commodity.

    This was my golden opportunity. My moment to shine.

    And what did I do?

    I froze.

    I threw up an aloof facade so potent that it was like scattering banana peels under their feet and sending them sliding away from my presence. I appeared stuck-up, full of myself, and out of reach when, in reality, I was a frightened imbecile hiding behind a fortress of muscle.

    In spite of my perfect tan and ripped physique, I was useless because I possessed the social skills of a wilted houseplant. All that bodybuilding had caused me to neglect more important matters: soul-building, social-skill building, mind-building. I was essentially a cipher. My chiseled body had done nothing to put me on the path toward the good life.

    Disillusioned with bodybuilding, I hit the books in college and tried to develop my mind with the same intensity I had applied to my body. I read Nabokov, Bellow, Kafka, and Dostoevsky. I learned to play piano works by Chopin, Schubert, and Brahms.

    And I became an annoying pseudo-intellectual snob.

    Intellectual pride, it turned out, didn’t put me on the path toward the good life either. My existence vacillated between the despair of believing I was a misfit while listening to The Smiths and the arrogance of believing I was superior to “the masses” while affecting the pomposity of Vladimir Nabokov. I had traded one costume for another. Instead of hiding behind muscles, I was hiding behind books, classical music, and intellectual affectation.

    I was a poseur, someone who didn’t know how to be real with himself or anyone else.

    So what was the good life?

    A life of authenticity, for starters. A life of humility in which I rejected both the hidden pride of despair and the more flamboyant pride of snobbery.

    But I can’t pretend the road toward authenticity was a straight line. There were starts and stops, loops and detours, concentric circles and occasional ascents. I did become more authentic over time, but not because I possessed a clear philosophy or followed a carefully constructed syllabus. Life challenges and conflicts with actual human beings forced me to surrender some of the facade and BS and learn to respect other people.

    Being respectful required being authentic.

    This was a long, gradual process. It didn’t happen because I read this philosopher or that one. No single book cracked open the heavens and handed me the operating manual.

    In the end, no philosopher was my teacher.

    Life was the teacher.

    And this brings me to a problem I have with The Good Life Method. I understand its impulse very clearly. Like these sharp, talented, well-intentioned Notre Dame professors, I love writing a course syllabus, which can easily double as a Life Syllabus. I love the idea of a plan, an outline, a sequence of building blocks, and a path toward the good life.

    But perhaps it is too pat. Too tidy. Too much like a pretty package with a ribbon tied neatly on top.

    Life may be too messy for the course outline. It may be too messy for resolution and absolute answers. As someone who struggles with my Jewish and Catholic background and remains agnostic about several enormous religious questions, I’m reminded of something Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about Herman Melville’s inability to achieve religious clarity: “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”

    I know that territory.

    I remain sympathetic to the goals of The Good Life Method. I want the Life Syllabus. I want the Enduring Understandings. I want the building blocks, the method, the telos, and the reassuring sense that one assignment leads logically to the next.

    I’m just not convinced that life has read the syllabus.

    And I have serious doubts that this method, or any method, provides a surefire path to the promised land.

  • Give Me Chaos and I Will Make You a Syllabus

    Give Me Chaos and I Will Make You a Syllabus

    If you are a good college instructor, you provide a haven for your students. By haven, I mean that you give them structure and order in a world of chaos and nonsense. There is a world outside the classroom, and it is a tempest of confusion, trickery, deception, wild-goose chases, chimeras, and misguided Holy Grails. Inside a young person’s mind, the world can resemble a jumble of blurry lines, flashing lights, and static on a 1960s television with a faulty UHF antenna. As an instructor, you have to pull your students out of that blinding, cacophonous television set.

    Your first job is to understand that they are rather comfortable living there. Just as a fish doesn’t know it’s wet after spending its entire life in water, students don’t necessarily know they live in confusion because confusion is their default environment. You have to make them see the disorder of their living space, persuade them that it is not normal, and convince them to look for an exit.

    This part of your class does not feel like a haven because it is disruptive. You must, as Kafka writes of good literature, be the axe that breaks their frozen ocean. You must create tumult. Students should occasionally feel as if the ground has been removed from beneath their feet. They should feel disoriented, even vertiginous.

    But this is where the haven enters. It is your course syllabus.

    The syllabus contains your purpose—not merely the official student learning outcomes but what educators Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe call Enduring Understandings. These are the large ideas students should carry with them long after the class is over. If you’re teaching a unit on the life of Frederick Douglass, for example, you don’t merely teach the courage of an adolescent who defied laws forbidding him to read and write. You teach that the interiority produced by advanced literacy allows a person to understand and crave freedom in ways that would otherwise be unavailable.

    But your syllabus contains more than course purpose, student learning outcomes, and Enduring Understandings. It contains the manual for implementing those goals. You give students a purpose, a structure, a timeline, and a method.

    That is the haven.

    There is something very American about the course syllabus. By American, I mean that our culture is embedded in the optimistic belief that we can fix things. The world is broken because, in part, people are broken, but give us the right how-to manual and we will get to work. Because we grow up with this belief, we tend to take free will and self-agency for granted. We can improve particular forms of intelligence, critical thinking, communication skills, marital intimacy, leadership, and financial stewardship. We can learn to write screenplays, become comedians, actors, yoga instructors, computer programmers, and whatever else the instructional manual promises.

    We recognize few bounds. We can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We can transcend economic and social class and ascend to the highest altitudes of American finance and status, where presumably everyone has a personal chef and a diversified portfolio.

    College instructors participate in this national faith. Depending on what course we teach, we provide a syllabus that is more than a schedule of due dates. It is more than a manual. It is an affirmation of self-agency and the hope of self-reinvention. It provides a haven of order and structure in a world of chaos.

    So being an instructor is a big deal. In fact, the word instructor doesn’t capture the gravitas of our calling. Perhaps another term is required. Perhaps we should be called priestocrats. Our very existence and role in society constitute an argument for self-improvement, self-agency, and order in a chaotic world.

    As someone who has taught college and written syllabi for forty years, do I really believe all this?

    I honestly don’t know.

    But I do know this: Writing a syllabus is enormously comforting because it makes me feel ordered and structured in a world of chaos. A syllabus gives me the sensation of control. I love writing them so much that I can imagine retiring from teaching less than a year from now and continuing to write syllabi “just for fun.” I will scour essays from various authors, discover some thematic through-line connecting them, and create an imaginary sixteen-week course complete with reading and writing assignments. There will be an Enduring Understanding, of course. There will be a telos, a higher purpose. There will probably be due dates even though no students exist.

    I will never stop writing syllabi because I have the Syllabus Gene.

    The gene revealed itself early. When I was thirteen, I became an Olympic weightlifter and, shortly afterward, a bodybuilder. I spent hours in my father’s office, where he had a beautiful blue IBM Selectric typewriter. I would type workouts, read them over, revise them, throw away the paper, and begin again. Each new version seemed to bring me closer to the haven of the Perfect Workout, the program that would optimize my fitness and provide the order I craved.

    The world was chaotic. The average man looked like a tomato with four toothpicks sticking out of him, and by God, I was going to create a manual that would spare me that indignity.

    Looking back, the connection seems obvious. The thirteen-year-old typing workout schedules on an IBM Selectric and the college instructor constructing sixteen-week composition courses are essentially the same person. Give me chaos and I will make categories. Give me confusion and I will create a sequence. Give me sixteen weeks and I will assign due dates.

    Perhaps that is what I have been doing for forty years. I thought I was creating a haven for my students. Maybe I was creating one for myself as well.

    So I am retiring from teaching college writing.

    But I will always write a syllabus.

    My sanity depends on it.

  • My Accidental COVID Shot

    My Accidental COVID Shot

    It was a sunny morning on the first of October when I sat taking notes in a Kaiser doctor’s office in Carson while my wife and her surgeon reviewed the post-op do’s and don’ts. Nothing over ten pounds for six weeks. No blood-thinning ibuprofen during that time. She could sleep on her side but not her stomach. She could lift her arms over her head. In a week, she would want vitamin E oil for the affected areas. In about a month, silicone scar cream.

    Eventually the conversation drifted from post-op recovery to their shared interest in child-rearing. My wife is a middle-school health and language arts teacher; the doctor has a one-year-old and a three-year-old and is currently serving a life sentence in the maximum-security wing of parenting.

    I grew antsy.

    A week earlier, I had missed my opportunity to get a drive-through flu shot, and at nearly sixty-five I don’t like missing my shots. Vaccinations have become another maintenance item, like rotating the tires or changing the furnace filter. Ignore the schedule long enough and something expensive starts coughing.

    I excused myself, received the blessing of my wife and her doctor, and took the elevator down to Floor One, where I found the vaccine station. I filled out a form, assured everyone that vaccines did not cause me to transform into Mr. Hyde, and sat beside a friendly nurse in her early thirties.

    “You’re okay with Pfizer?” she asked.

    “What are my other choices?”

    “None.”

    “Then don’t offer me Diet Pepsi when there’s only Diet Coke.”

    She laughed.

    The shot burned like hell. It burned even more after the needle came out, but I maintained my dignity, thanked the nurse, and returned to Floor Three, where my wife was waiting in the post-op area.

    I told her about the burning.

    “Did you get a flu shot?” she asked.

    I nodded. Of course I had. I had gone to the flu-shot station she had pointed out earlier.

    “Sounds like you got a COVID shot.”

    “She did say it was Pfizer.”

    “That’s COVID, dude.”

    There are moments when a single sentence rearranges reality.

    We returned to the vaccine station, and sure enough, sitting there in plain sight were two stacks of forms: one for flu and one for COVID.

    I was a car that needed unleaded and had somehow filled itself with diesel.

    Since I was already there—and apparently collecting vaccines like G-Shocks—I decided I might as well get the flu shot too, this time in the opposite arm.

    I rolled up my sleeve.

    “Flex or relax?”

    “Relax,” the nurse said, “or you’ll be sorry.”

    This seemed like excellent advice for vaccines, aging, and perhaps life in general.

    I relaxed.

    I thanked her for both shots and returned to my wife, who reminded me that the last COVID vaccine had turned me into a basket case for about twenty-four hours. This was unfortunate timing. She was recovering from surgery and needed me functioning at something approaching full capacity, not wandering around the house shivering beneath a blanket and announcing that death was imminent.

    I promised that when we got home, I would take three ibuprofen and a nap and prepare myself for whatever punishment my immune system had scheduled for the next twenty-four hours.

    Perhaps I should be grateful. Through a combination of diligence, confusion, and poor signage comprehension, I had knocked out two vaccines in one visit. My shingles vaccinations had been completed six months earlier. Now COVID and flu were checked off the list.

    At nearly sixty-five, you begin to appreciate these small victories. Retirement is approaching, bringing with it enough disruptions, anxieties, medical appointments, identity crises, and mysterious bodily developments without influenza, shingles, or COVID joining the welcoming committee.

    So perhaps I’m ready.

    We shall see.

    Meanwhile, I’m eager to tear off these damn Band-Aids.

  • I Lived in the Before Times

    I Lived in the Before Times

    The Boomer shaking his fist at the television while denouncing the stupidity of the world—or standing on his lawn, arms akimbo, broadcasting his bitter displeasure with the neighborhood’s rapid decline—is an archetype of a particular kind of pathetic old-timer. He cannot accept his growing misalignment with the world. His rage is fundamentally rooted in fear: he is living in a world he no longer understands and increasingly lacks the ability to navigate. Unable to adapt, he acts out. He is a man sinking in quicksand with no rope within reach.

    Understood this way, retirement and old age are partly about misalignment and the primal terror of becoming isolated by it.

    It is tempting to dismiss the Boomer accordingly. He is simply curdling in old age and knows there is nothing he can do about it. Like the Wicked Witch screaming, “I’m melting!” he is slowly disappearing from the world.

    But we oversimplify the Boomer’s demise at our own peril. Two seemingly contradictory things can be true. On one hand, the Boomer really is misaligned with the world and may lack some of the adaptive skills necessary to flourish in it. On the other hand, some of his roots in the past point toward a superior way of being.

    I’m talking about reading.

    I’m talking about reading a paragraph containing complex ideas and understanding it.

    Not just a paragraph, either. A long essay. Even a book.

    The Boomer has lived in the Before and After Times. In the Before Times, his brain was trained for sustained reading. He processed the world through text, made sense of his place in it, and constructed a worldview by reading enormous amounts of material. Through reading, he learned to identify patterns, cycles, sophistry, trickery, deception, charlatanism, and occasionally authenticity.

    He was literate.

    The After Times are considerably less hospitable to literacy. We now spend large portions of our lives inside engagement farms, euphemistically called “social media platforms,” where fragmented attention is not a design flaw but the business model. The platforms compete to keep us clicking, swiping, gawking, raging, desiring, and returning. Sustained thought must compete against an industrial apparatus designed to interrupt it.

    The Boomer terrified by his misalignment therefore confronts an uncomfortable paradox. He legitimately fears his own growing ineptitude while also witnessing a different kind of ineptitude spreading around him: people losing their tolerance for sustained attention.

    Living in a post-reading society and knowing the difference because you lived in the Before Times is a peculiar privilege of age. I have students who were in sixth grade when the pandemic denied them anything resembling normal schooling for nearly two years. They spent much of their adolescence with TikTok, Instagram Reels, Snapchat, YouTube, and Roblox. Reading rarely occupied the center of this world. When assigned, it could feel less like intellectual discovery than community service for toilet-papering somebody’s house.

    Short video clips engineered to deliver immediate stimulation became the staple product of the engagement farms young people carried everywhere in their slender glass bricks. Childish Gambino captured something about this condition in “This Is America.” Violence and social breakdown erupt throughout the video while dancing, spectacle, and entertainment continually hijack our attention. The catastrophe is happening right in front of us, but something more stimulating keeps wandering into the foreground.

    If someone as young and culturally fluent as Childish Gambino can suggest that we are losing ourselves inside spectacle and distraction, the old Boomer ranting on his lawn suddenly deserves another hearing.

    There really was a Before Times when sustained literacy occupied a larger place in ordinary intellectual life, and its erosion has consequences. This is the subject of James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. As part of his research, Marriott contacted senior academics who told him that it was becoming increasingly difficult to assign a novel and expect students to read it within a week.

    I can attest to the larger problem. Assign long books and many students won’t read them. Some will drop the class. Eventually word spreads that you assign books, and students may avoid your section unless circumstances force them into it. You can assign one short book and give students the entire semester to read it. Even that is no longer a surefire proposition.

    I saw the accelerated decline of books in my own classrooms around 2012, almost exactly when smartphones reached critical mass and became mandatory accessories. Around that time, the lavish visits from textbook representatives began disappearing. No more kiosks and catered food. No more giant boxes of composition readers, essay collections, and grammar books arriving at our offices for inspection. The hundred-dollar composition textbook began its long march toward extinction. Even the used-book buyers vanished—the cheerful scavengers who once wandered into our offices and handed us cash for unwanted textbooks gathering dust on our shelves.

    College is a business. The business model had changed.

    Students were finding cheaper alternatives to outrageously priced textbooks, which was often a welcome development. But something larger was changing at the same time. We were increasingly creating classroom content for students living inside an information environment that competed directly against sustained reading.

    To my credit, I have adapted. I now break reading and writing assignments into shorter visual components using Google Slides. I make the concepts visible. I map arguments. I isolate terms. I provide examples.

    But sometimes I wonder whether adaptation has quietly become accommodation.

    I find myself hand-feeding information more than I did in the past. Instead of asking students to wrestle with a difficult text until they extract its argument, I increasingly extract the argument, put it on a slide, define the terms, provide the mapping components, and lead them through the analysis. The very skills I want reading to develop are sometimes the skills students need before they can tolerate the reading.

    There is the trap.

    So yes, I am misaligned.

    I am the aging man standing on the lawn wondering what happened to the neighborhood. I lived in the Before Times, and part of me will always remain there.

    But misalignment does not necessarily mean error.

    Sometimes the old man yelling from the lawn really is yelling at a fire.